The Contradictions
How They're Everywhere And How To Embrace Them
We’re each an amalgamation of contradictions. I love coffee, yet get angry when it burns my tongue. I love cold showers, yet can’t wait for them to be over while I’m in the moment. I love to walk, yet shiver and hope for the warmth and comfort of the inside. I love my friends and family, yet I have a fresh, passionate dislike for my phone, and hence I’m prone to disappear for short periods. These concepts show the opposing aspects of life which we can embody at the same time. We’re all a mish-mash of contradictions.
Take, for instance, our hope for freedom. We seek the freedom to do what we desire while craving the security of routine and comfort. This contradiction emerges in our everyday choices. Do we pursue a safe career or travel down the path of a more fulfilling dream? Do we travel the world or remain in the comforts of home?
We search for purpose while seeking to comprehend the randomness of life, even questioning what this thing we call life is at all. On the one hand, we set goals that determine our directional purpose. This clashes with much of life being outside our control, leading to inner conflict. Do we push for more, or surrender to the forces of fate?
We hold an idea of our idealised lives while struggling to bridge the gap between reality and aspiration. We seek productive days, yet sit lounging around bingeing Netflix and eating junk food. Societal pressures strain this gap between reality and aspiration further.
We can possess a belief, while still contradicting this belief with our actions. We could believe in sustainability, while possessing, wasting, and consuming more than we need. But we are not hypocrites. We live in a complex world where our ideals can be difficult to attain.
As I discussed last week, we can feel nostalgic for previous versions of ourselves and wish to return to this, while also appreciating our progress towards who we are today.
We can even feel love and pain—or happiness and sadness simultaneously. This sums up a world of complexity. Specifically, that we are complex. We’re walking, talking uncertainties that don’t fit into neat categories. And that’s ok.
What does this mean for us? To start, it means progress is never linear. We take a step forward, and two backwards, before jumping three steps, only to move one back. It means we can easily get comfortable. It means we can get frustrated with ourselves as we seek to make sense of this personal paradox. For a man who discusses jigsaws representing life, very rarely do the pieces fit neatly together. We try to craft an external view that we have everything figured out. The internal reality is that this is an issue we never fully resolve.
We could interpret this lack of clarity as a personal flaw, but this friction is what makes us human. This friction, the tug-of-war between contradictions, is what shapes us as we adapt to the inevitable march of life. It should be welcomed that we are not static, but ever-changing. This is what makes life beautiful, right?